Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York

WILLIAM

HOLBROOK

BEARD

1824 – 1900

AMERICAN ARTIST

L’OURS (THE BEARS) SCULPTURE BY DAN OSTERMILLER, Sc.

GIFT OF THE ARTIST 2002

William Holbrook Beard (1825 – 1900) was born in Painesville, Ohio. He was a popular 19^th Century American wildlife painter who specialized in characterizing animals as though they were people.  His comical paintings pictured animals as humans dressed in clothing with human expressions.

Beard’s monument in the Green-Wood Cemetery at Brooklyn, New York, is reminiscent of the playful treatment that Beard gave his animals in the paintings that made him famous.  The round and pudgy bear that marks Beard’s grave was sculpted by the great Wyoming-born sculptor, Dan Ostermiller (born in 1956), as a tribute to Beard as an ode to one wildlife artist from another.